| Abstract |
Smart cities are especially suited for improving urban inclusion by combining digital transition and social innovation. To be smart, a city has to provide every citizen with urban spaces, public services, and common goods that are effectively affordable, whatever the citizen's gender, culture, origin, race, or impairment. Based on two design workshops, the "Vibropod" and the "Pointe-aux-Lievres", this paper aims at highlighting the contributions of design fiction to the improvement of the spatial capability of hearing impaired people. This research draws its originality from both its conceptual framework, built on an interdisciplinary and intersectoral composition of arts and sciences, and its operational approach, based on the use of the DeafSpace markers and the TRIZ theory (Russian acronym for Inventive Problem Solving Theory) principles. The two design fiction workshops demonstrate that considering the singularity of the human being as an actual acoustic material constitutes an innovative opportunity to improve the role of universal design in a smart city project. By reversing the classic posture, and defining disability by looking at characteristics of the environment rather than as limits of the people themselves (their bodies or their senses), this research proposes an innovative way of addressing smart city inclusivity issues. This paper shows how increasing spatial enablement and having better control of spatial skills can offer deaf people new skills to improve the use of technology in support of urban mobility, as well as give them tools for feeling safer in urban environments. |
